Archive for November, 2007

office supply update

November 20th, 2007 Comments(0)

Quick update on my post below. OfficeDepot announce today that earnings were down 9%. US same store sale fell 5%.

Look for them to continue to have troubles if the holiday season does not perform like last year. Now lets watch staples and see if they can overcome the - going into November.

Are office supply companies in holiday trouble?

November 09th, 2007 Comments(0)

Out of curiousity, I wanted to take a look at a vertical market that is dominated by three players. Looking at Office Supplies online the players are Staples.com, OfficeDepot.com and OfficeMax.com. Revenue between those three account for over 98% of total e-commerce revenue for that vertical market. The 2005 (sorry, working of an old Internet Retailer book) revenue is as follows:

officerevenue.png

Basically, Staples.com and OfficeDepot.com were the same with OfficeMax.com pulling in a respectable $2.6B, yes BILLION. So that was 2005. Now lets look at what is going on now. Check out the compete.com chart below which includes the most current visitor data for October:

officsupplies.png

What is cool is that you can download the data you can see the 12 months prior visitor data which I downloaded to Excel below:

uniques.png

Okay, a couple of things stand out.

  • Overall visitors to the three combined are down 9% vs. October last year.
  • OfficeMax.com traffic is down over 18% vs. October Last Year
  • OfficeDepot gained 2% market share in October of this year.
  • OfficeMax.com makes more money per visitor than Staples.com and OfficeDepot.com
  • November and December visitors last year were all +50% vs. October last year.

    • So the questions are:

  • Will OfficeMax have below expected holiday sales?
  • Will OfficeDepot.com overtake Staples.com?

    My educated guess is that holiday sales at the big office supply sites are going to struggle vs. last year. Look for them to promote more in the upcoming months due to the current downturn in visitors to their sites. OfficeMax.com has a big hill to climb and needs to push hard quickly.

    • Run away from us….

    November 08th, 2007 Comments(0)

    navisite-logo.gif

    Nice move NaviSite. So how bad is it when not only do your customers sites go down during a migration but then you admit to them that the servers their sites reside are on a truck headed to MA from MD. NICE. You can just hear the conversation, hey it is going to cost $$$ to lease servers and transfer the sites. Ah, gas prices are much less than that, lets just drive them.

    Here is the CNET article

    Back from ad:tech 2007

    November 07th, 2007 Comments(0)

    This was one really large conference. I heard various figures from people but it looked to me more on the floor than usual. Of course the big facebook announcement really led the charge.

    There were three floors of booths packed in at the Hilton New York - so many that I didn’t come close to seeing all of them since we had a catch a plan back to Boston.

    Big thanks to everybody who came by the internet oldtimers event on Monday night. It was a great success and we were really happy to sponser it this year.